Gudrun Schyman, parliamentary candidate for Feminist Initiative. The fact that Sweden is ‘better' when it comes to gender politics is not to say that equality has actually been achieved.' Photograph: Jonathan Saruk for the Observer

There is an election in Sweden in a few days, and if you mention the fact that a feminist party is close to entering parliament you will often receive knowing eye-rolls in response. Of course, Sweden … where else? This country, after all, is the land of gender-neutral pronouns, “latte dads” proposals to tax men to offset the cost of domestic violence and a tourism website proudly proclaiming “the modern Swedish man is a feminist”. (From my entirely subjective experience, these eye-rolls are significantly more common and exaggerated if you happen to be speaking to a man.)

The problem with this understanding of feminism and gender politics in Sweden is that it is a mélange of fact, suggestion and myth. Yes, Sweden is ranked as one of the best places for women to work and have children, but it is also a place where men dominate corporate boards, make more money than women for the same work and take four times less parental leave than women. And, of course, this is in addition to the everyday sexism and sexual violence that permeates Sweden, as it does virtually every country in the world. The fact that Sweden is “better” than other countries when it comes to gender politics is not to say that equality has actually been achieved.

Enter Sweden’s Feminist Initiative. Founded in 2006, the stated aim of the party is to “drive through a feminist politics for a world free from discrimination” and to undermine “gendered power structures”.

It’s not often a political party that looks likely to attract a tiny proportion of the vote in a country of 10 million garners much attention, but as Swedes head to the polls on Sunday, FI could make a small piece of history. With support nearing 4% – the threshold required to enter the Swedish parliament – FI could become the first feminist party to enter parliament within an EU country, and one of a miniscule number to do so globally.

The picture wasn’t always so rosy. When FI took part in its first national campaign in 2006 it received a minuscule 0.68% of the vote. The party struggled on and ran again in 2010, managing to attract 0.4% of the vote – putting it only 13,000 votes ahead of the Swedish Senior Citizen Interest Party. Things looked pretty bleak.

But in the run-up to the 2014 European parliament elections, Sweden went through what FI leader Gudrun Schyman has called a “feminist spring”. There were television programmes on the state of Swedish feminism, a national debate took place and FI began to see significant growth in membership. In turn, poll numbers rose and, amazingly, FI became the first feminist party to get a seat in the European parliament when it attracted 5.3% of the vote.

The language used by the party can be alien to outsiders, with words such as “heteronormativity”, “structural discrimination”, “patriarchal” and “subordination” sprinkled throughout its website. The tone can be academic in nature and FI is often dismissed as a one-issue party with little grasp of how its feminist agenda can be applied in practice.

To me, this dismissal misses the larger point regarding the party’s practical and symbolic importance. Whether or not FI enters the Swedish parliament, what it has contributed to the Swedish political landscape is another important layer to what I describe as a “national conversation for adults” about feminism and gender politics: a conversation, I argue, that I did not see in other countries where I have lived – namely the US (my home country), the UK and Turkey. It seems impossible to have a grown-up discussion on gender equality unless you can agree that discrimination at the macro and micro levels of society is real and doesn’t just exist in the heads of mythological, cartoonish man-haters.

I grew up in Europe in the late 1970s and 80s, and remember how the greens were dismissed by the mainstream media and political establishment as nothing more than a motley collection of ex-hippies with no understanding of real-world politics who coalesced around a single issue. Now, 40 years later, I think it is fair to say that the greens were way ahead of their time, and it was the media and political establishment who were ill-informed, condescending and short-sighted.

In the same way, it is all too easy to dismiss parties such as FI as “pie in the sky” idealists racking up protest votes. Whether you support it or not, if the only thing FI achieves is to keep discrimination, feminism and equality firmly entrenched in the Swedish political agenda, and to ensure that these issues are acceptable topics for broad national debate, that is an achievement for which any party should be congratulated.